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Whither global warming? Not Harvard

February 10, 2015

Climate is an integral of local weather over time and space . If climate change (specifically global warming) does not show up as weather then it does not exist. From The Harvard Crimson:

Snow on Plympton

A student walks down Plympton St. on Monday evening, flanked by growing piles of snow. – Harvard Crimson

 As many Harvard schools cancel classes Tuesday for the third time in as many weeks — only its fourth snow day since one in 1978—administrators have begun to consider ways to compensate for lost instructional time. ……. 

……. Harvard has had only five snow days in the last four decades; before this semester, the only other two were in 2013 and 1978. …..

 …….. Between 2013 and 2015, Harvard has seen four of its five snow days in four decades. In 1977, before a snow day in 1978, former Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III joked that, “Harvard University will close only for an act of God, such as the end of the world.”

It wasn’t a joke.

Clearly snow days are to be taken as an Act of God where I take “God” to represent the natural variations in weather (and climate) which are beyond the wit of man to influence. But it does take some imagination for a winter snow storm to be equated to the “end of the world”. A summer snow storm might better qualify!

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Di Caprio puts on an act for climate change

September 26, 2014

I am always more than a little suspicious when a “celebrity” starts supporting some “benevolent” cause. My suspicions are directed primarily at the cause – not so so much at the celebrity. The celebrities are celebrities because they want to be. Their narcissistic urges are usually very well developed. But any “cause” which has to enlist the use of celebrities – with no particular qualifications other than being well known – to prop up its justification for existing is demeaned and damaged by the exercise. The celebrities of course get the extra exposure they so yearn for.

Whether it is Victoria Beckham on Millenium goals or George Clooney on Poverty or Arundhati Roy on dams or now Leonard Di Caprio on Climate, I find the causes are damaged while the celebrities satisfy their narcissistic urges. Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger must be the kiss of death for the causes he supports. In fact studies have shown that the good causes of the famous ‘benefit themselves more than the charities. 

The chief beneficiaries of star-studded attempts to raise the profile of a good cause are the celebrity themselves, according to sociologists, who say the appearance of altruism makes them more popular with the public.

Two pieces of research by UK academics argue that “the ability of celebrity and advocacy to reach people is limited” and that celebrities are “generally ineffective” at encouraging people to care about foreign causes.

But the publicity surrounding Di Caprio this week has been particularly gratuitous and unconvincing. He attended President Obama’s speech about Climate at the UN on Tuesday:

RCP: ……… But it was President Obama who provided the most visible sign that the talks were heading in the wrong direction. Arriving late, the president looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else. The president’s tone in speaking to his fellow leaders and delegates was as if he were talking to a meeting of congressional Republicans. Five years had passed since the failure of the previous round of talks at Copenhagen, he said. Since then, the scientific understanding had advanced. What was once a distant threat had, the president claimed, moved firmly into the present, although the president did not mention that global temperatures have been flat for a decade and a half and that there had been little scientific advance to explain it.

Those words were prologue to the president’s blunt warning. The U.S. is stepping up to the plate, the president declared. The U.S. must be joined by other nations. Nobody gets a pass, especially the big emerging economies, climate change code for India and China, whose leaders were giving the summit a pass. Solving climate change was a matter of taking a lead, the president said, making the improbable claim that giving a lead is what the United Nations General Assembly is for.

There were quite a number of empty seats in the chamber as the president spoke. Secretary of State John Kerry played with his BlackBerry. Many looked bored. At the end of the president’s remarks, the most enthusiastic applause came from DiCaprio. Perhaps that’s because he’s good actor. The climate change talks might be attracting dwindling audiences. But there’s one thing you can bet on: the climate change show will run and run. 

Ah Well.

Maybe there is a silver lining in the celebrity cloud.

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Little Ice Age was due to low solar irradiance

March 10, 2014

The Sun is the only real source of energy available at the surface of the earth (and any heat from nuclear reactions at the earth’s core is extremely small if not completely negligible). That the oceans have a much higher heat capacity than the atmosphere at the surface of the earth is obvious. It seems also fairly clear to me that it is the dynamics of ocean – atmosphere interactions which control climate and weather. And it is the oceans and long time scales which dominate climate while it is the atmospheric variations and short time scales which determine weather.

But the driver is always the Sun.

A new paper in Nature GeoScience “used seafloor sediments taken from south of Iceland to study changes in the warm surface ocean current. This was done by analysing the chemical composition of fossilised microorganisms that had once lived in the surface of the ocean. These measurements were then used to reconstruct the seawater temperature and the salinity of this key ocean current over the past 1000 years.”

The researchers found that ” low solar irradiance promotes the development of frequent and persistent atmospheric blocking events, in which a quasi-stationary high-pressure system in the eastern North Atlantic modifies the flow of the westerly winds. We conclude that this process could have contributed to the consecutive cold winters documented in Europe during the Little Ice Age.”

Paola Moffa-Sánchez, Andreas Born, Ian R. Hall, David J. R. Thornalley, Stephen Barker. Solar forcing of North Atlantic surface temperature and salinity over the past millennium. Nature Geoscience, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2094

Abstract: There were several centennial-scale fluctuations in the climate and oceanography of the North Atlantic region over the past 1,000 years, including a period of relative cooling from about AD 1450 to 1850 known as the Little Ice Age. These variations may be linked to changes in solar irradiance, amplified through feedbacks including the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Changes in the return limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation are reflected in water properties at the base of the mixed layer south of Iceland. Here we reconstruct thermocline temperature and salinity in this region from AD 818 to 1780 using paired δ18O and Mg/Ca ratio measurements of foraminifer shells from a subdecadally resolved marine sediment core. The reconstructed centennial-scale variations in hydrography correlate with variability in total solar irradiance. We find a similar correlation in a simulation of climate over the past 1,000 years. We infer that the hydrographic changes probably reflect variability in the strength of the subpolar gyre associated with changes in atmospheric circulation. Specifically, in the simulation, low solar irradiance promotes the development of frequent and persistent atmospheric blocking events, in which a quasi-stationary high-pressure system in the eastern North Atlantic modifies the flow of the westerly winds. We conclude that this process could have contributed to the consecutive cold winters documented in Europe during the Little Ice Age.

Cardiff University Press Release:

Changes in the sun’s energy output may have led to marked natural climate change in Europe over the last 1000 years, according to researchers at Cardiff University. The study found that changes in the Sun’s activity can have a considerable impact on the ocean-atmospheric dynamics in the North Atlantic, with potential effects on regional climate.

Scientists studied seafloor sediments to determine how the temperature of the North Atlantic and its localised atmospheric circulation had altered. Warm surface waters flowing across the North Atlantic, an extension of the Gulf Stream, and warm westerly winds are responsible for the relatively mild climate of Europe, especially in winter. Slight changes in the transport of heat associated with these systems can lead to regional climate variability, and the study findings matched historic accounts of climate change, including the notoriously severe winters of the 16th and 18th centuries which pre-date global industrialisation.

The study found that changes in the Sun’s activity can have a considerable impact on the ocean-atmospheric dynamics in the North Atlantic, with potential effects on regional climate.

Predictions suggest a prolonged period of low sun activity over the next few decades ……..

Though their study has nothing whatever to do with global warming and any man-made effects they still feel it necessary to add this caveat (presumably because the reviewers, and the Journal, or both, insisted).

Predictions suggest a prolonged period of low sun activity over the next few decades, but any associated natural temperature changes will be much smaller than those created by human carbon dioxide emissions, say researchers.

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“Black holes don’t exist” – Hawking applied to climate

February 3, 2014

Stephen Hawking’s recent paper is causing much consternation as Geraint Lewis describes in  The Conversation.

But could it be that it is Hawking’s non-existent black holes – located at the bottom of the oceans – which have swallowed up all the heat predicted by climate models and which has gone missing?

Grey is the new black hole: is Stephen Hawking right?

Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist.

Such statements send social media into conniptions, and comments quickly degenerate into satirical discussions of how you should never believe anything scientists say, as they just make it up anyway.

S. W. Hawking, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, arXiv:1401.5761v1

Abstract: It has been suggested [1] that the resolution of the information paradox for evaporating black holes is that the holes are surrounded by firewalls, bolts of outgoing radiation that would destroy any infalling observer. Such firewalls would break the CPT invariance of quantum gravity and seem to be ruled out on other grounds. A different resolution of the paradox is proposed, namely that gravitational collapse produces apparent horizons but no event horizons behind which information is lost. This proposal is supported by ADS-CFT and is the only resolution of the paradox compatible with CPT. The collapse to form a black hole will in general be chaotic and the dual CFT on the boundary of ADS will be turbulent. Thus, like weather forecasting on Earth, information will effectively be lost, although there would be no loss of unitarity.

But while Geraint Lewis considers whether “black” is actually “grey”, I think it is no more complicated than a zero-sum game of arcane physics. Whereas zero divided by zero may be indeterminate it seems to me that zero multiplied by zero must be a double zero.

Apart from the obvious that a “black hole” – by its very naming – must therefore mean a double-dose of nothingness it is worth noting that Hawking – being the ultimate authority for Sheldon Cooper – distinguishes between “apparent horizons” which are not real “event horizons” and that he compares the chaos of collapse to a black hole to “weather forecasting”!!

Or did he mean “climate forecasts” and “climate modelling”? After all the hidden heat could well have been swallowed up into the fathomless pit of climatic black holes.

Maybe the abstract should read:

Chaotic climate and the black holes of climate modelling

It has been suggested that the resolution of the climate paradox for hidden heat is that the oceans are surrounded by firewalls, bolts of outgoing radiation that would destroy any infalling climatologist. Such firewalls would break the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and seem to be ruled out on other grounds. A different resolution of the paradox is proposed, namely that climate models produces apparent warming but the warming is a negative warming where heat is lost. This proposal is supported by the reality of the hiatus in global temperatures and is the only resolution of the paradox compatible with CS (common sense). The collapse to enter the new glacial will in general be chaotic and the approach of such a condition will be turbulent. Thus, like weather forecasting on Earth, information will effectively be lost, although there would be no loss of unitarity.

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Climate warming due to humans is highly uncertain says new paper in Science

February 2, 2014

The level of uncertainty in this supposedly “settled” science never fails to amaze. But I observe that it is beginning to be politically acceptable to talk about the uncertainties and even – as in this paper – to begin to question the significance of human activities on climate.

“Climate Effects of Aerosols-Cloud Interactions.“ Daniel Rosenfeld, Steven Sherwood, Robert Wood, Leo Donner. Science VOL 343, 24 JANUARY 2014

Abstract: Aerosols counteract part of the warming effects of greenhouse gases, mostly by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back to space. However, the ways in which aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models. As a result, the radiative forcing (that is, the perturbation to Earth’s energy budget) caused by human activities is highly uncertain, making it difficult to predict the extent of global warming (1, 2). Recent advances have led to a more detailed understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate, but further progress is hampered by limited observational capabilities and coarse-resolution climate models.

The paper is behind a pay-wall but the accompanying press release begins “The warming effect of human-induced greenhouse gases is a given, but to what extent can we predict its future influence?”. I have no doubt that “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere have a small warming effect but evidence is still lacking even for this simple statement because the carbon balance of the earth is still far from certain and the extent to which fossil fuel combustion contributes to the carbon dioxide concentration is still not certain. So while the warming effect of  greenhouse gases is established, its magnitude is not and the impact of humans on the concentration is also not yet certainly established. In fact, the primary contributors to the “greenhouse effect” are still water vapour and clouds but clouds also cause significant cooling by blocking insolation. Carbon dioxide by itself is almost of minor consequence and the weakness of climate models has always been that they make unjustified assumptions for the forcing effects of carbon dioxide. The pause in warming over the last 17-18 years and the slight decline in global temperatures for the last decade – while carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing – is a further indicator that the warming effect of carbon dioxide has been grossly exaggerated.

The Press Release goes on:

…… Indeed, one could say that the picture is a “cloudy” one, since the determination of the greenhouse gas effect involves multifaceted interactions with cloud cover.

To some extent, aerosols –- particles that float in the air caused by dust or pollution, including greenhouse gases – counteract part of the harming effects of climate warming by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected from clouds back into space. However, the ways in which these aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models, say the researchers. As a result, the radiative forcing (that is, the disturbance to the earth’s “energy budget” from the sun) caused by human activities is highly uncertain, making it difficult to predict the extent of global warming.

And while advances have led to a more detailed understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate, further progress is hampered by limited observational capabilities and coarse climate models, says Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of  the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of the article in Science. ….. 

Their recent studies have revealed a much more complicated picture of aerosol-cloud interactions than considered previously. Depending on the meteorological circumstances, aerosols can have dramatic effects of either increasing or decreasing the cloud sun-deflecting effect, the researchers say. Furthermore, little is known about the unperturbed aerosol level that existed in the preindustrial era. This reference level is very important for estimating the radiative forcing from aerosols.

Also needing further clarification is the response of the cloud cover and organization to the loss of water by rainfall. Understanding of the formation of ice and its interactions with liquid droplets is even more limited, mainly due to poor ability to measure the ice-nucleating activity of aerosols and the subsequent ice-forming processes in clouds.

Needless to say they end up asking for more funds:

While it is unfortunate that further progress on understanding aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate is limited by inadequate observational tools and models, achieving the required improvement in observations and simulations is within technological reach, the researchers emphasize, provided that the financial resources are invested. 

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Clouds | 3 Comments »

Solar and ocean cycles – without any CO2 influence – are sufficient to explain climate changes

December 7, 2013
  1. The de Vries solar cycle together with the AMO/PDO are sufficient to explain the main climate variations of the last 1000 years
  2. It is unnecessary to invoke carbon dioxide and its effects to explain the climate cycles
  3. The 21st century will see an underlying cooling due to the de Vries cycle and then modulated by the AMO/PDO. 

The 200-210 year de Vries solar cycle (also known as the Suess cycle)  has been postulated for some time (here and here for example)  as being one of the main natural cycles governing our climate.  The effect of the de Vries cycle can be traced back through the glacial record through many millenia and even through geologic ages. Many solar effects work on climate through ocean cycles. The Atlantic/Pacific Oscillations are well known as  drivers of climate and can be traced back through at least about 1500 years. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has a period of about 66 years while the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has a slightly shorter cycle of 60 years.

The entire hypothesis that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and therefore human emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for “global warming” is based on the argument that nothing else can explain the warming witnessed during the 20th century. Yet this is not just conjecture it is a fantasy based on ignoring the effect of the natural cycles that are known to exist. In fact there is no need to invoke carbon dioxide concentration to explain the ups and down of climate. German researchers have now shown that just the de Vries Cycle together with the AMO and the PDO are quite sufficient. The period in the 1970’s and 1980’s often used as the foundation for “global warming” theory can be quite sufficiently explained by the AMO/PDO.

Just as we had about 100 years of an underlying warming due to the de Vries cycle in the 20th century, we are in for an underlying cooling through the 21st century in response to the de Vries solar cycle. This underlying trend will be modulated by the ups and downs of the AMO and the PDO. Carbon dioxide concentrations are largely irrelevant. 

The following is from an article at NoTricksZone:

German Scientists Show Climate Driven By Natural Cycles – Global Temperature To Drop To 1870 Levels By 2100!

by Prof. H. Luedecke and C.O. Weiss (Original German version here).

We reported recently about our spectral analysis work of European temperatures [1] which shows that during the last centuries all climate changes were caused by periodic (i.e. natural) processes. Non-periodic processes like a warming through the monotonic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause at most 0.1° to 0.2° warming for a doubling of the CO2 content, as it is expected for 2100.

Fig. 1 (Fig. 6 of [1] ) shows the measured temperatures (blue) and the temperatures reconstructed using the 6 strongest frequency components (red) of the Fourier spectrum, indicating that the temperature history is determined by periodic processes only.

On sees from Fig. 1 that two cycles of periods 200+ years and ~65 years dominate the climate changes, the 200+ year cycle causing the largest part of the temperature increase since 1870.

EIKE_2

Fig. 1: Construction of temperatures using the 6 strongest Fourier components (red), European temperatures from instrumental measurements (blue). It is apparent that only a 200+ year cycle and a ~65 year cycle play a significant role.

The ~65 year cycle is the well-known, much studied, and well understood “Atlantic/Pacific oscillation” (AMO/PDO).  It can be traced back for 1400 years. The AMO/PDO has no external forcing it is “intrinsic dynamics”, an “oscillator”.

Although the spectral analysis of the historical instrumental temperature measurements [1] show a strong 200+ year period, it cannot be inferred with certainty from these measurements, since only 240 years of measurement data are available. However, the temperatures obtained from the Spannagel stalagmite show this periodicity as the strongest climate variation by far since about 1100 AD.

……….

Summary

The analysis of solar activity proves the existence and the strength of the 200+ year periodicity which we found from historical temperature measurements, as well as from the Spannagel stalagmite data. This 200+ year cycle is apparently the one known as “de Vries cycle”.

This solar “de Vries cycle together with the AMO/PDO determine practically completely the global climate of the past  (Fig. 1) and the coming time. A significant influence of CO2 on the climate thus has to be excluded. This latter is not surprising in view of the small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its weak infrared absorption cross section (also in view of the various proves of NEGATIVE water feedback).

The present “stagnation” of global temperature (Fig. 5) is essentially due to the AMO/PDO: the solar de Vries cycle is presently at its maximum. Around this maximum it changes negligibly. The AMO/PDO is presently beyond its maximum, corresponding to the small decrease of global temperature. Its next minimum will be 2035. The temperature can expected to be then similar to the last AMO/PDO minimum of 1940. Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the “little ice age” of 1870.

It accounts for the long temperature rise since 1870. One may note, that the stronger temperature increase from the 1970s to the 1990s, which is “officially” argued to prove warming by CO2, is essentially due to the AMO/PDO cycle.

[1] H.Luedecke, A. Hempelmann, C.O. Weiss; Clim. Past.  9  (2013) p 447

[2] F. Steinhilber, J. Beer; Journ. Geophys. Res.: Space Physics  118  (2013) p 1861

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Ancient humans coped with massive climate change (without the IPCC)

October 1, 2013

Many people today seem to like to live in the fear of an impending catastrophe. The fears are all artificial and always include fanciful predictions of doom. Fears of uncontrollable population explosions, food shortages and starvation, of energy crises and depletion of all resources and of course of catastrophic global warming. And they give rise to such utterly useless bodies as the IPCC.

The period from before the last interglacial, the Eemian and through to the current interglacial in the Holocene has seen the rise of Anatomically Modern Humans and, starting from Africa, the peopling of the world. Anatomically modern humans make their appearance in Africa during an even earlier interglacial at around 250,000 years ago. They saw a descent into glacial conditions with global temperatures dropping about 6 °C and sea levels  dropping by some 150m. Then around 130,000 to 135,000 years ago a very rapid (relatively) climate change ocurred as the conditions of the Eemian were established.  Global temperatures increased by some 7 °C and sea levels rose by upto 170m. Temperatures were warmer than today and sea levels were higher.They didn’t just survive this change – they thrived. They made their way through the Sahara (perhaps through ancient green river corridors) and established themselves in the North and North-East of Africa. At this time sea-levels were high and crossing over into Europe or to Arabia would not have been possible. Both these crossings would have been made at earlier periods by the precursors of AMH and such groups would have given rise to the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia. When sea levels allowed and perhaps driven by desertfication they crossed into Arabia. From Africarabia they moved across the globe – again perhaps driven by desertification of Arabia.

All these predecessors of ours – some ancestors and some distant cousins – not only survived but actually thrived. They had no IPCC to warn them of looming catastrophe if sea levels rose by 20 cm or temperatures rose by 1.5 °C. Not realising their dangers they still coped with changes of 7 °C and sea-levels of 170 m. Of course they were not without their resources. They had fire. They could probably speak but they had not been contaminated by the written word and were not corrupted by IPCC reports. They may have had some primitive form of rafts but they had no boats and the wheel was unknown. They had stone tools and their version of WMD consisted of many spears. They just coped with the weather and whatever it threw at them. They didn’t waste time predicting the climate and living in the fear of their own predictions. They had other more real fears to worry about.

Former interglacials

The period after the Eemian and upto the present day is particularly interesting.  For most of the time the world was in the grip of glacial conditions. Even as the climate changed and the world started warming up, there were sudden spikes of climate in the reverse direction as with the Younger Dryas. It was in this glacial period that AMH left Africa and then peopled the entire globe. It was not a period of stable climate and their expansion and growth took place in an environment of frequent and violent change. Real population increase started some time before the neolithic when we were still hunter-gatherers or semi-nomadic herders.

Age of Human Expansion

Age of Human Expansion

Of course in North Africa and the Middle East and Asia where much of the action took place for AMH there was little danger of advancing ice sheets. But there was the constant risk of sudden desertification, the drying up of fresh water resources and the sudden loss or appearance of new coastal land as sea levels increased or decreased. Rainfall patterns would have changed. Landscapes would have been transformed from forests to savannahs to deserts and back again. The only recourse available to humans of that time was to move to a more viable location whenever their survival was threatened.

And as they did that they populated the world and they prospered.

But they could have been stopped in their tracks if they had had the benefit of an IPCC.

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IPCC still cooking it’s books to cover-up the inconvenient truths

September 27, 2013

The 95% probability/certainty of global warming being due to human activity is based on a show of hands and not on any evidence or statistical analysis of data. What it actually says is that 95% of all global warming believers, believe.

Late last night the IPCC delegates in Stockholm were still messing around preparing their 30 page political summary of their AR5 report to be released today.

The political summary of AR5 is primarily a CYA effort to protect the posteriors of the policy makers (mainly political figures, bureaucrats and activists) in the face of a long row of broken models and broken hypotheses. The IPCC has forgotten that natural variability is a euphemism for unknown mechanisms which cannot be calculated or predicted. It is going to be interesting to see just how the summary report will cover-up, deny or ignore the long string of inconvenient facts:

  • Global temperatures have not risen for 17-18 years while CO2 has kept on increasing. 
  • Global temperatures have been declining for the last 11 years. 
  • None of the IPCC’s computer models have predicted the warming hiatus or the cooling over the last decade.
  • Global wildfires are lower than normal. 
  • Rainfall patterns (and the Indian monsoon) continue within the bounds of known natural variability. 
  • Food and grain production is at an all-time high. 
  • Flood frequency and flood levels have not been at unprecedented levels. Just more people live in flood-plains today than before. 
  • CO2 in the atmosphere reached the magic level of 400 ppm (albeit for just a few hours) and nothing happened.
  • How much of the CO2 concentration increase is due to carbon dioxide from fossil fuel. combustion is unclear but fossil fuel emissions are only 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. 
  • The absorption and release of carbon dioxide by the oceans is unknown and the error margin is greater than the total amount released by fossil fuels.
  • CO2 absorption mechanisms do not care where the CO2 being absorbed came from.
  • The sensitivity of global temperature to CO2 concentration has been grossly exaggerated by the computer models.
  • Carbon dioxide concentration is more likely to follow global temperature (due to subsequent changes in emission and absorption rates) than to lead it.
  • Sea ice levels are increasing at both poles with the Antarctic at record high levels.
  • Polar bear populations are thriving and increasing.
  • Sea levels are continuing to rise at just the historical levels due to the recovery from the last glacial and are not accelerating due to industrialisation or the use of fossil fuels.
  • Oceans are still strongly alkaline and any increase in acidity is within known natural variability.
  • Coral reefs have shown themselves to be self-healing when damaged and are not showing any signs of ocean acidification.
  • Climate models have grossly underestimated solar effects because the mechanisms are unknown.
  • Sunspot activity in SC24 is well down from SC 23 and is not unlike the period of the dalton minimum during SC5 and SC6.
  • Clouds and moisture in the atmosphere have a much bigger impact on global warming and cooling than CO2 in the atmosphere.
  • Cloud formation is linked to sunspot activity and cosmic rays.
  • Global warming and cooling follow solar effects via the oceans in long decadal cycles.
  • The number of hurricanes and tornadoes are at historically low levels.
  • Heat released from the earth’s interior by tectonic and volcanic activity is not known.
  • A Little Ice Age is more likely than further Global Warming and a global cooling cycle lasting 20-30 years may have begun.
  • This interglacial is due (within c. 1000 years) to come to an end.

There is more we don’t know that we don’t know about the climate than the IPCC would like to admit. And for policy makers, activists and bureaucrats who have followed misguided policies for the last 25 years it is no longer possible to admit that they have been making “certain” predictions in an ocean of uncertainty. They have replaced scientific objectivity by “consensus science” where the validity of a hypothesis is based on how many believe and not on evidence. The 95% probability/certainty of global warming being due to human activity being touted by the IPCC is based on a show of hands of believers, and not on any evidence or statistical analysis of data.

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Move over Nessie! Make way for the Heat Monster in the deep oceans

September 23, 2013
Heat Monster of the Deep

Heat Monster of the Deep (Artist’s impression because it has never been seen)

Global warming has stalled. Global temperatures have been static and may have declined slightly over the last 17-18 years.

Antarctic ice extent is higher than it has been for many years.

Arctic ice extent has just reached its annual minimum and has grown by about 70% from last year’s low.

Polar bears are thriving. Sea levels are increasing ever so slightly and are matching the expected levels for the recovery from the last ice age. The oceans are not getting very acidic (and remain alkaline). Harvests are higher than they have ever been before. The world is feeding more people than ever before. The developing world is crying out for available and affordable energy.

Global warming has gone negative.

But Global Warmists, the IPCC and the policy makers who have been duped for the last 2 decades are in a state of complete denial.

The Guardian (who else?):

“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

How very scientific!

We know the warming is there because our models must be correct. We can’t see it, we can’t measure it and we don’t know how it got to the deep ocean from the surface but we are sure it’s there!!!!!! The Heat Monster of the Deep ate it.

We seem to have entered a cooling cycle – courtesy of the Sun – and settled climate science is reducing to inventing new monsters of the deep. We may even be entering a new Little Ice Age but the policy makers are continuing with useless measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions which seem to have little impact – if any – on our climate cycles.

Move over Nessie!

The Heat Monster of the Deep is here. It comes to the surface every so often and swallows the heat and dives straight down to to the deep ocean.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate | 1 Comment »

Simple truths are becoming highly inconvenient for the IPCC

September 21, 2013

The simple truths are

  1. Global temperatures exhibit no warming for the last 17-18 years, and
  2. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased continuously during the same period  noting that man made carbon dioxide emissions constitute about (at most) 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

The tag of “Denier” is now shifting to the Global Warmists who are denying that there is a hiatus in “global warming”. And to those who deny that the causal link between carbon dioxide concentration and global warming – which itself is highly speculative – is now clearly broken.

The Global Warming brigade are now putting pressure on the IPCC and “learned” journals to conceal, cover up, explain away and generally deny these two simple truths for the upcoming release (in parts) of the AR5 report. It is a full-court denialist press to try and ensure that AR5 is not treated as scrap even before it is released.

The reality of global temperatures is increasingly diverging from increasingly discredited climate models. In fact the reality of global temperature measurements since about 1978 would not provide any convincing evidence that any concern regarding “global warming” was justified.

Climate Models versus Reality

Not only are temperatures not increasing as the models  – and their religious adherents – would like but atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to increase unabated.

Global temparature and carbon dioxide – last 17 years

The two simple truths lead to two simple – but inescapable – conclusions

  1. There is no evidence that “global warming” is an irreversible phenomenon. There is no evidence either that global warming or global cooling are anything other than “natural” variations of climate.
  2. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is not strongly indicated – if at all – as anything but a very small component of the very many which affect global temperature. The man made contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions itself  is about 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate | Comments Off on Simple truths are becoming highly inconvenient for the IPCC

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